"Love is not loved."

Richard Rohr reminds us that St. Francis' espousal of God as a God of peace and love came at a time when the Christian church was "waging a Holy Crusade against its enemies, the Saracens." This marks as revolutionary St. Francis' profound belief in a God of nonviolence, a God of the poor and suffering, a God of the lowly and the powerless. Often, in frustration at the world's failure to recognise that God is love, Francis would cry out, "Love is not loved."

"Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love." John 4:8

God is love: He is the very essence of love; He is the personification of love. God does not love us because we deserve His love. God does not stop loving us because we are undeserving of His love. God's love for us is unconditional.What would it be like to love unconditionally? Those of us with children probably come closest to it: we love our children whether they transgress or not; forgiveness for them is never too far away. But our love for our children is often fraught with worry and anxiety, with recriminations and admonitions. And which of us is not guilty of implying that we would love them more if they would only follow our instructions to the letter?

What, I wonder, would it be like if we loved the world and everyone in it unconditionally? What would it be like if we loved beyond impatience, beyond irritability, beyond disgust, beyond horror, beyond fear, beyond hatred? What would it be like if we loved beyond judgement?Think of the wonderful liberation from fret and fume, from care and anxiety, which that kind of loving would grant us! Think of the serenity, the peace beyond all understanding that would be ours if we embraced love as our only truth! Our lives could flow onwards clearly and cleanly, without the sludge of negativity to turn them back on themselves.

Today our world seems intent on peddling hatred. What if we refused to allow the purveyors of hatred to win? What if we looked hatred in the face and recognised it for what it is: love turned sick and fearful, and instead of reacting with a corresponding hatred, or a thirst for revenge, we simply loved our enemies as Jesus instructed us to, and wished them a speedy return to health? What if we cried out with Paul, "I see and approve the better things of life, but the evil things I do!" In other words, what if we recognised that within the best of us, there is some evil, and within the worst of us there is some good?

What if we were to give love free rein and tell others through our words or actions that we would rather die than hate them? What if we embraced the truth that love is the only creative, redemptive, transformative force that exists? What if we freed ourselves from our tiny, self-important, false selves and acknowledged the truth of our glorious oneness with the vastness of Love?